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The document was signed by 'Bernd' and 'Rudi Ringel'.

Poor 'Rudi Ringel' (described in this interrogation report as a lathe operator). He must have been enthralled by the revelations in Freie Welt and come forward of his own volition, probably hoping to win kudos with the local party, possibly a glass of schwarzbier or a holiday in the spa town of Friedrichroda. Instead, he was whisked off to Moscow and then Kaliningrad, forced to become a party to state secrets, interrogated by Kuchumov, then Enke and now 'Bernd'. But the one thing he could never do, after writing that fateful letter to Freie Welt, not if he wanted to stay alive, was back down.

On 9 November 1979 'Bernd', a.k.a. Uwe Geissler, reported back to the Stasi Secretariat. He had at last found trace of 'Rudi Ringel's' father and what he revealed was not what he told us in the concrete chalet in 'Goat's Throat Village'.

'Rudi Ringel's' father was a member of the NSDAP but from 1940 was attached to a post office protection unit. 'Bernd' wrote: 'After an injury [name blacked out] suffered while serving in occupied Poland he was disabled out of the service. According to his daughter, since then he had made a living by manufacturing bags from scrap fabric' It was highly unlikely that an invalided post office security guard would have been entrusted with the Amber Room by Erich Koch.

At the back of 'Rudi Ringel's' Stasi file is this conclusion:

The statement made by ['Rudi Ringel'] is wrong. He either deliberately or indirectly made difficulties for the Amber Room investigation and misdirected the search, causing it great harm. It is suggested that judicial responsibility should be examined according to paragraph 228, concerning false accusations, and paragraph 233, aiding and abetting.

'Rudi Ringel' also stood accused of 'providing false information to Soviet organs'. All of the Soviet excavations in Kaliningrad based on 'Rudi Ringel's' evidence had been a waste of time.

We call Geissler at his apartment in East Berlin, near Allee der Kosmonauten, and ask him what happened to Enke and his digs to find BSCH, the secret hiding place for the Amber Room? Was it these digs that led to the outing of 'Rudi Ringel' as the son of a lame post office guard?

All we can hear on the line is the wheezing of Geissler's emphysemic lungs. 'We dug,' says Geissler. 'We dug and dug. Pulled in experts from Switzerland. Heavy machinery hired from abroad. Paid for it all in hard currency. Spent 6 million or thereabouts [500,000 dollars] on excavating just one of the mines. And eventually we did get into the tunnels of Schwalbe V, near Gera. It had been a Nazi underground factory where scientists were trying to synthesize petrol from coal. Enke had told the bosses, "We are the first to get in." But when we lit up our torches... ' The line goes silent. A crackle as Geissler inhales. 'We found nothing but small, charred, rolled-up pieces of Pravda dating from July 1945. The Red Army had been there, decades before us, and left behind their cigarette butts. We even knew the date. Back in 1945 supplies of everything were low, including cigarette papers, and the Soviet troops used pages from Pravda instead. Enke had been wasting our time.'

As we ponder how everything came to a grinding halt in an empty mine already searched by the Soviets (with 'Rudi Ringel' in the dock), the functionary in pearls enters the room. 'Time, please,' she says, tapping her wristwatch.

1O

In the last week of May 1980 Generalmajor Karli Coburger and Generalmajor Jochen Biichner, two of the Stasi's most senior directorate heads, met to discuss Paul Enke's career.1

According to Enke's personal file, KSII404/82, he had 'exposed LOO possible locations for the Amber Room' over twenty-five years of service. Using the pseudonym Dr Paul Kohler and the cover 'functionary at the State Archives Administration', Enke had 'got in touch with West German citizens and with FRG journalists' in connection with the issue of restitution of stolen Soviet